FEBRUARY 8, 2025 – Not to be overly dramatic, but for the second time in my life I’m experiencing what I’d characterize as a “personal crisis of perception.” That’s a rather vague description, I realize, for what could be cast more definitively as a “worldview crisis” or “big picture crisis.”
In any event, my first such encounter with this sort of disturbance occurred 18 years ago with the convergence of:
(a) my reading a book my mother (a life-long Episcopalian) gave me by a Canadian Catholic priest on the benefits of communal worship,
(b) my reading of a collection of essays by the popular astrophysicist, Carl Sagan,
(c) my post-Sunday service conversations with an unusual small town Lutheran pastor (ELCA) who loaned me a book by the radical Episcopalian theologian, Bishop John Shelby Spong,
(d) my reading of that book, which gave me a huge jolt of intellectual courage,
(e) conversations with a scholarly ordained big city Lutheran pastor (ELCA) who’d dropped out of the pastorhood and become a fellow real estate lawyer (!), and who was a walking PhD thesis—more like a centipede of PhD theses (his office was 15 feet from my own, so I heard about lots of PhD level inquiries), and
(f) an “organizational situation” at our local (Lutheran – ELCA) church where I was heavily involved as a member of this, that and the other committees; music provider; fund-raising cheerleader; Sunday school teacher; and last but hardly least, president of the congregation.
In far less time than it took to get from the dead of winter to the first big spring thaw, I entered and exited a “personal crisis of perception.” I wound up dropping out of church, then exiting Christianity nearly altogether. I say “nearly” to reserve an agnostic’s place at the table.[1]
My current “crisis” was precipitated by the confluence of: (a) the first 148 pages of a 680-page history book originally published in 1980 and most recently updated in 2003, (b) a 30-minute pre-election YouTube video shared by a friend in Finland, connecting dots that I’d seen, heard, read about independently over the past year; a description of the “Butterfly Revolution” featuring JD Vance and a pack of stridently doctrinaire Libertarian philosophers (so perceived) and tech billionaires hellbent on imposing their dystopian designs for the world’s future, and (c) recent actions by the new regime that align closely with the “hellbent” crowd and led by President Musk.
Now that you’ve heard the boom of the howitzer inside my head, let me describe the three shells that the cannon fired into my thoughts, triggering my immediate “crisis.” (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] I remain a “cosmic believer,” meaning, I believe in “God” as that force, that power is manifested in the laws of physics and their interaction with chemistry and biological evolution. I also consider myself to be a “cultural Christian,” respectful of the religion’s central imperative (the Golden Rule) and supportive of the “good” side of the church, as exemplified by such people as Archbishop Budde of the National Cathedral, and various other Christian clergy and adherents whom I admire and respect, plus the good works of the church in matters of social justice and charitable efforts, and all the great art, music and architecture associated with Christianity. These sentiments carry over to moderate sects of the other mainstream religions, as well. I have trouble accommodating irrational, puritanical, judgmental doctrine and dogma, however.
